Trickle-down Stupidity and a Danger to Humanity: Homeschooling?

When podcasters Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan recently attacked home-educating parents and their children as stupid and selfish, they offered prejudice in place of evidence (see here). Their claims amount to an ad-hominem and bigoted assault on millions of families—atheist, Christian, Muslim, secular, every other background, and every ethnicity and color of skin. Some wondered if they would later reverse course but they did not.

Claims Without Basis versus Research Evidence

A new systematic review of only peer-reviewed, representative-sample studies (Ray, Hoelzle & Pietersma, 2026) reaches the opposite conclusion. Sixty-two percent of those studies find homeschooled students significantly outperforming others academically. Sixty-four percent find better social-emotional outcomes, such as lower depression, higher social competencies. Fifty-four percent find stronger adult outcomes—greater political tolerance, higher conscientiousness and agreeableness, lower neuroticism and divorce rates. In the large majority of the remaining studies the homeschooled perform at parity, not worse.

Are some homeschooled children and adults who were home educated doing poorly in one of the three areas noted above? Of course some are, as are some students in (or graduates of) public and private schools. The large majority of studies show, however, statistically significantly more positive outcomes associated with homeschooling than with non-homeschooling.

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